Goal: Do the Dishes

Today I’m all about goal setting. I’ve been drifting through these past few weeks, hanging on by the skin of my teeth. It’s time now to buckle down and get stuff done. Mostly because this is the worst week I’ve had so far. I’ve got a giant presentation at the end of this week as well as prepping for the madness that is sure to ensue after the Thanksgiving break. Side note: I can not believe that Thanksgiving is just over a week away.

Between helping a friend with a mild crisis, constantly playing catch up with homework and housework, and being a little selfish and spending time with C, I’ve been letting myself simply get by. But now I’m trying to develop some tools to help keep me on track.

Mint.com – I recently came across the idea of Mint. It’s a really well-developed and secure budgeting tool that makes finances easy to understand. I can set bill reminders, adjust my monthly budget, and categorize my spending so I can see just how much money I’m spending on my mandatory grande vanilla latte every few days. I would definitely suggest this tool to anyone looking for a better way to manage your spending or set saving goals. And, it’s a pretty awesome user interface, which I notice now more and more because of my silly graduate school classes.

Meal planning – I’ve been trying to get C to help me plan meals ever since he and I moved in together. I’ve always thought it would help us with grocery shopping and for those days when C gets home before I do so that he could start cooking, which happens more often than not. While I haven’t really had time to do a full-blown, down to the hour, meal plan, I have been doing something a little different. At the start of the week I’ll write a list that lists all of the possible dinner options that we have currently in our cupboards. This way there’s a little less pressure to stick to a plan and we can mix and match dinner with how much or how little we want to cook that night. Or sometimes we just walk down to Jimmy John’s.

Prioritized lists – Right now, this is my life. I’m constantly having to decide what tasks are more important right now than others. I’ll do this using my Todoist app, or sometimes if I get sick of looking at the computer, I’ll make a handwritten list. Sometimes it’s nice to be able to physically cross something off of a list. My biggest issue is deciding what to do first, but once I examine deadlines or the purpose behind my task, it’s pretty easy to see that I, for example, need to work on my group project instead of writing for NaNoWriMo – even though I’m SO far behind on NaNo.

Chore list – I know this is kind of lame, and C thinks so too, but I think it would work for us. We have this problem where we both totally hate doing the dishes. We’d rather order a pizza than have to do a ton of dishes just so we can make dinner and get them dirty again. My mom has suggested doing a little bit of the work each night, that way it never piles up. This is a genius idea, but putting it in practice is proving to be more difficult than I thought. So my solution, of course, is to make a little list of daily chores, like dishes, wiping down the counters, picking up abandoned items around the house (shoes, scarves, and jackets are proving to be the most abandoned items), etc. I’m hoping it will work for us!

Let’s all try and get through these next few weeks and into the holiday season!